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CRIME WATCH FOLLOWUP: Delridge gunfire suspect out of jail

(UPDATED TUESDAY MORNING with suspect getting out of jail – also, see comments for more info)

3:52 PM: Late Saturday night, we reported on a gunfire suspect arrested near Delridge and Genesee. We have more information this afternoon from both SPD Blotter and the police report. First, just published on SPD Blotter by the department’s Jonah Spangenthal-Lee:

A ride-share driver led police to arrest a convicted felon Saturday night and recover a backpack filled with meth, crack cocaine, cash and a handgun.

Officer Nic Plemel was on patrol in the Delridge neighborhood around 11 PM Saturday when he heard the sound of gunfire several blocks away.

Moments later, a ride-share driver called 911 and reported seeing a man dressed in a white t-shirt, jeans and a red baseball cap firing a gun on the street in the 5400 block of Delridge Way Southwest.

Officers arrived and immediately saw a 29-year-old man, dressed just as the 911 caller had described, standing behind a bus stop at Delridge Way SW and SW Genesee Street.

Officer Plemel and Officer Nathan Worthen approached the man, who was standing right next to a backpack on the ground. He refused to answer any questions, but said the backpack wasn’t his.

When police looked inside the backpack, they found $2,700 in cash, 53 grams of suspected methamphetamine and three containers of marijuana. They later discovered 21 grams of suspected crack cocaine in the man’s pocket.

After a witness confirmed the 29-year-old was the same person they had seen firing a gun on the street, officers also discovered the 29-year-old is a previously convicted felon.

Officers booked the man into the King County Jail for drug possession and unlawful possession of firearms and are investigating.

According to the police report, a gun also was found in the backpack. We’re checking on the suspect’s record and status and will update with whatever more we find.

4:12 PM: The suspect’s background includes multiple felony convictions, according to what we’ve found so far in online records, including previous drug and gun cases.

7:33 PM: We’ve obtained the police-report narrative from the probable-cause documents provided at a hearing this afternoon during which the suspect’s bail was set at $150,000. It has some additional information beyond the SPD Blotter summary:

It says officers were in the 4100 block of Delridge at 10:59 pm Saturday night when they heard what they thought were gunshots in the area of Delridge and Genesee. 911 got a lot of calls too. One was from a ride-share driver who said that he heard the shots, and his passenger reported seeing a man shooting on the east side of the street. The ride-share driver then looked east and saw what he thought was a man reloading a handgun. The passenger thought he saw the man at Delridge/Alaska; the driver, after dropping off the passenger, went back to the area and told officers he thought it was further north, near Delridge/Genesee. Officers searched there for shell casings and then spotted a man standing near a bag on the ground, though he moved away as an officer approached and noted he resembled a description given by the ride-share driver. He was the only person on the street in the area, but wouldn’t give them his name, nor answer any questions, and when asked if the bag was his, shook his head repeatedly side to side.

Since nobody therefore was there to claim the bag, officers looked into it, and, the narrative says, “observed a revolver-style handgun lying inside the backpack.” The ride-share driver, meantime, identified the man as the person he had seen with a gun. Officers got the suspect’s name from a Social Security card in his possession, and matched it to a booking photo. He subsequently came up in the law-enforcement data system as a “Potential Armed Career Criminal” and a convicted felon. They arrested him on suspicion of a firearms violation; subsequently, seven 9mm shell casings were found nearby (the report then says “though no 9mm pistol was located in the area,” and the police report says the revolver from the backpack was .22 caliber).

At the precinct, officers took “inventory” of the aforementioned backpack and said it contained $2751, 53.1 grams of suspected meth, and three “Tupperware-style containers” filled with marijuana. Additional cash apparently was found on the suspect, because the police report totals the cash associated with him to total #2,996 in all. The report also lists his “last known address” as a house on Pigeon Point.

TUESDAY MORNING, 6:39 AM: The jail register shows the suspect posted bond and was released just before midnight.

Am I reading correctly that the ride-share driver saw the man firing shots in the 5400 block (between Brandon & Findlay), but he was later located further north in the 4100 or 4200 block at Genesee? The 5400 block has had a few recent incidents involving gunshots, including one where bullets struck a house. I doubt we’ll hear more, but it would be interesting to know if this suspect has any connection to those prior incidents.

That’s what SPD Blotter says. On Saturday night, I only heard about the location where he was stopped, Delridge/Genesee. I might get a little more documentation if he’s indeed in for a bail hearing today. Have just been checking on his record, in the meantime.

I was having trouble with that as well, mainly because it sounds like everything happened pretty quickly. The Delridge Library is on the 5400 block and Genesee is nearly a mile further north, by the Delridge Playfield. It would take 10-15 minutes to walk that.

Hi all, I now have the narrative via the probable-cause documents from the suspect’s bail hearing (at which $150,000 was set as bail). I don’t know where the 5400 Delridge address came from – maybe the writer got some confusing or erroneous information – but anyway, the narrative says the shell casings were found near where the officers found the suspect, Delridge/Genesee (the driver/witness had originally seen him at Delridge/Alaska). So what I’m going to do is add the narrative transcription above, after what’s there now. – TR

Great job SPD. It just sickens me to read about these stories each day and feel so helpless most of the time. One less prick terrorizing the neighborhood…hopefully for a long time. But I imagine it’s like pulling gray hairs. For each one you pluck, 10 more grow in its place. Sigh.

Attorney here. I get frustrated when I hear people blaming judges for ostensibly lenient sentences. The sentencing guidelines are created by the legislature. Anyone is welcome to check the Sentencing Reform Act section of the RCW. An exceptional departure on the lower or higher end of the sentencing guidelines is just that: fairly exceptional and requires clearly articulable reasons. Blaming the judge is nonsense. If you’d like to incarcerate even more people for longer periods of times, in spite of the fact that our nation incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation, then talk to the legislature.

Ok Stephen, I didn’t mention anything about judges, but saw this on the internet from a lawyer‘s website. Here’s what it says:

If you have been convicted of certain criminal offenses in the past, you are not legally able to possess a firearm. If you have a felony charge on your record and are caught in possession of any firearm, whether loaded or not, you may face an additional felony.

Depending on your criminal history Unlawful Possession of a Firearm can be classified as serious as a Class B felony. This seriousness level III felony carries a potential sentence of 1-43 months in prison and fines reaching into the several thousands.

So it seems that for this particular situation that the lawyer is talking about, there is a range of 1 month to 43 months. That’s hardly sounds like the judges hangs are tied. Maybe this guy will just get off from “suffering” from allfuenza. You’re frustrated? Imagine what the police feel like? Since I work with them daily, I don’t have to imagine. I hear it all the time.

The actual sentenced imposed is guided by the offender score, which is calculated by previous convictions, number of current offenses, firearm enhancements, etc. The range you referenced for the offense of a felon in possession of a firearm is so wide because there are any number of offender scores; the higher the score, the larger end of that scale for that single, particular conviction. I’m sure your police friends are frustrated, we all are with scumbags who open fire in public. That still doesn’t mean you have any idea what you’re talking about. When you get a bar license and begin to practice perhaps you can offer some insight.

Yep, the local sentences are a joke. We are just too cheap to keep losers like this in jail. He serves no useful purpose other than to keep police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges employed. Oh wait, I see a pattern here.

Still doesn’t change the fact this pillar of society had two ounces of meth, discharged a handgun (likely stolen) and is a career armed felon who will post a mere 15k bail and be out doing the same thing tomorrow. Our criminal justice system you and I are a part of is broken, I don’t need to pass the bar to see that or offer “insight”.

So when this fool finally kills someone, maybe, just maybe he will spend some time in the big house.

Most likely he wasn’t hugged by his momma when he was younger and didn’t have a positive male role model in his home growing up. We need to focus more on what creates these kind of losers in the first place.

His Washington record goes back to 2004, when he would have been 17, a Juvenile Court gun conviction. The next year, when he was 18, the first documents that can be read online, he was arrested downtown with a gun and drugs (crack and marijuana, the documents say) packaged to be sold.

Again, for those who missed it: adult felony sentencing is governed by the Sentencing Reform Act (SRA) of 1981, RCW Chapter 9.94A. The appropriate standard sentence range for an offense is determined by identifying the seriusnessness level of the offense and by “scoring” the offender’s criminal history. This is all governed by statute, meaning the legislature drives this and not the judiciary.

WSB doesn’t mention what sentence was imposed previously. Everyone is claiming he was let right back out … Does anyone know how long he was in prison? Our state has a “three strikes” law for violent felonies, the Persistent Offender Statute, also contained in the SRA. Again governed by statute, not discretionary. If you’d like to see what felonies qualify for POS, see the statutory definition of “Most Serious Offense,” RCW 9.94A.030(33).

Stephen, I have a lot more research to do … going to look next at the guy’s last conviction. I don’t know if any of them were violent felonies. I actually thought $150,000 bail sounded pretty hefty considering no one was injured in this incident, but it’s all relative to your resources … Also following up on several other notable incidents in the past week, including the “brazen burglary” arrest. His bail was set at $7,500 … but he didn’t have a permanent address and I suspect that unlike the guy in this case, he won’t be getting out any time soon unless they decide not to charge. – TR

Update… His last conviction was for an attempted home-invasion burglary in Burien, guilty plea in 2013, which came along with an unlawful firearm possession conviction; he was seen ditching a backpack that had a .380 in it. He was sentenced to 43 months, which was the low end of the range given his offender score at the time (43 to 57).

I’ll join in on attacking judges and the system. How is that you sentence a known violent criminal to the low end of how long he’s going to spend in prison when his most recent crime was a home invasion robbery, while being a felon armed with a firearm?

Also, clearly bail wasn’t high enough, particularly if I’m understanding correctly that he has no known address. For him to be out on the streets again within just a couple of hours is despicable.

OK Stephen, here’s what I do know. You being irritated and the police being irritated are on two different levels. You may see the same people, but you see them from the security of a court with bailiffs, police, etc. These guys go out everyday and put their butts on the line, often getting verbal abuse and risking physical assault or worse. So when they arrest the same people over and over, being irritated is a bit of an understatement.

What I also know is that criminals look to risk vs. reward. If the risk is low (as it is with our impotent punitive sentencing) and the reward is potentially high, why would a criminal with the mindset of a criminal stop committing crimes? The answer is, they don’t and that’s why you see them over and over.

And as WSB just demonstrated. the judges have more authority than is let on. Due to this POS offender’s score of 43 to 57, it seems the judge had the authority to sentence this POS to up to 57 months and yet he received only 43 months.

And to look at an extreme case of a judge using their discretion in sentencing, there is the judge in Texas gave one person 10 years probation for killing 4 people due to “suffering” from affluenza and gave another person who essentially was guilty of the very same crime, 20 years in prison.